A Mile Wide And An Inch Deep
People selling collectibles on eBay say their market is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” In other words, customers for collectibles are all over the world and interested in different things. In such a market, you deal mainly with customers who you never meet. You sell them something at the “prevailing market price.” The condition of what you sell and honest dealing are critical. Cheat and every collector will know it. You may never get a repeat sale, but if you’re lucky and find a big collector, you’ll get many. The vintage engine niche is somewhat like this.
As mentioned earlier, Terry Harkin’s machine shop in Watertown, SD, has been around since 1906. He says he “does not do many” complete engine rebuilds a year, but a lot of babbitting. Except for Chevys and a few Hudsons, most jobs are for prewar engines. “This business has gotten bigger over the years,” Harkin explains. “Now, we get them from all over the world and a lot from the West Coast and New York. You work for one guy and do a good job and he tells his friends – I think that’s what happened with the business I get from New York.”
Zigmont Bilus of The Babbitt Pot in Fort Edward, NY, says that he used to have customers sending in lots of bearings in boxes for him to rebabbitt, but now the big demand is for rebuilding and that babbitt work is down to 25 percent of his business in the past four to five years. Bilus is in his 70s and most of his customers are older, semi-retired people.
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“They make up most of the market,” he notes. “But I also get 10 percent from younger people who are doing well and restore cars as a hobby. Bilus does what he calls, “Pre-teens to 1940s engines.” He stays away from muscle cars because he doesn’t have modern equipment. “I have a valve seat grinder with a stone,” he says. ”I do them one at a time.”
Like many antique engine rebuilders, the Babbitt Pot sees work coming in from far away. “Every year, the radius for my work punches out a little further,” Billus points out. “Now, I get people from New England, Jersey, New York, Arkansas and Florida calling and saying ‘I saw your ad’ and they’re shipping them in from all over; well, a Packard engine can cost $500 to ship these days.” When customers ask what it costs, his stock answer is “$1,000-$1,500 per cylinder bore.” To his amazement, the jobs still come in. “I was used to doing a half dozen a year, now I’m doing 12 to 18 just to keep busy, since the market for babbitt work is shrinking and fewer people are doing what I do with the babbitt work included.”
It’s hard not to take Dennis Stinehart’s laugh as a sign that he’s very happy with the level of business at his Berry Machine Co. in Mason City, IA. “We specialize in old stuff and babbitting and we’re busier than buckshot,” he tells us. “We’re doing the engine for a ’24 Cadillac that was in the ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ movie and came in from Warren, MI. We’re also doing the engine for an old pickup from Denton, TX and a V16 for a 1939 Cadillac limo.”
Stinehart also says that business seems to be growing each year. “And we don’t do muscle cars,” he stressed. “There’s three other shops in town and we let them mess with that stuff. For us, the important thing is doing things right because our clients want that. We even run the engines in the shop before they go out.”
Fred Seydel’s business in Chester County, PA, is called Fred’s Engine Service. He says he redoes “a dozen engines in a good year” and he only does complete rebuilds that are actually restorations. He paints an engine as soon as the metal is cleaned and says, “to my customers, appearance is 0just as important as the mechanical work.” Seydel feels that engines are too expensive to ship and sticks to jobs in a 500-600 mile range of his shop. “I have quite a following within 50 miles, with a lot of repeats,” he explains. “I get a lot of older, wealthy clients who have more than one car and that means a lot of repeat business.”
Like some – but not all – antique engine rebuilders, Seydel finds that his business is “very seasonal with no winter work.” He says that his advantage is all of the different engines he has worked on over the years. “I was 16 when I started on this stuff and I’m still working on the same stuff I was doing then,” he emphasized. “There’s no book that teaches people what I do and I offer my customers a lot for their money; if they’re local, I even go over to their place to start the engine for the first time, because it’s important to start them right.”
Russ Schworer of Paul’s Rod & Bearing (paulsrodsandbearings.com) in Parkville, MO, says he’s making a living doing babbitt bearings. “We saw many machine shops go under four or five years ago,” he points out. “Old timers knew how to do it, but babbitt is so specialized that their businesses struggled.” Schworer said it amazed him how previous recessions did not impact his business, “But this one definitely did,” he admits. “A year ago last December things were really slow, but now it’s getting better. I’m not seeing optimism, but the big doom and gloom mentality is gone.”
Schworer says that the restoration market has helped. He is doing about 65 percent of his business for antique car engines these days. He’s helped restorers with a 1907 Rolls-Royce engine and one for a Packard, plus lots of Model T and Model A Ford stuff. He has more than 600 vintage rods and pistons in stock. “We have a lot of people who just come by here and clubs like the Antique Truck Historical Society. Our best customers are probably John Deere restorers.”
To stay healthy businesswise, Schworer watches his accounts receivables closely and keeps suppliers on a short leash. “The restoration customers have enough money and it seems like the economy isn’t bothering them,” he explains. “And sometimes these cars have sentimental or investment value.”
According to Schworer, there’s definitely still a market in babbitt and I have photos of neat old cars we did all over the place.” Unlike some other shops, Paul’s stays busy even in the summer and winter months. “My customers are restoring cars in the winter, so typically wintertime is a pretty good season for us,” he says.
After joking that he had a huge shop with 500 employees, Mike from Vintage Engine Machine Works in Coeur d’Alene, ID, says his one-man shop does “total restorations” of just five to six engines per year. “We specialize in full-blown show engines for old cars and old boats,” he says. “We paint the parts before we put them together and our customers want the gaskets to show for the car shows.” VEMW does rebabbitting and rebuilding of mostly American engines.
“The economy has been in a steady decline the past few years so I say a lot of prayers and do a lot of hoping that the phone will ring,” Mike notes. “But in the past year I did a Cadilac V8, a Model A Ford four-banger, a 230 Dodge flathead six and a 192 Chevy overhead-valve six. A few years ago, I actually had a run on Chevy sixes and I’ve done Buick, Packard and Hudson straight eights. I haven’t done many Ford flathead V8s lately. What I get in really varies.”
To get an overview of the restoration engine market we asked Angelo Van Bogart, editor of Old Cars Weekly (www.oldcarsweekly.com) what he’s seeing and hearing about engines from his 70,000 readers. He says there are two types of rebuilders, those building modern type hot rods with crate engines, and those who will go to extreme lengths to keep an engine original. Van Bogart feels that years ago auto collectors would rebuild their own engines, but that today both backyard restorers and restoration shops rely more on professional rebuilders.
The hardest part about building a vintage engine is that it isn’t a small-block Chevy,” Van Bogart stated. “Often, if a supplier is out of parts, they will wait until demand builds before firing up the machines and making another batch.” When Angelo had a 1955 Cadillac V8 rebuilt, he found it hard to locate someone who knew the nuances of his engine during reassembly. “As cool engines like early Olds V8s and nailheads and flatheads become older, the supply of running parts cars decreases,” says Van Bogart. “Old engines like these seem to now be sourced from people’s garages, where they have been stored for many years, or from long-parked salvage vehicles, and in both cases, they need to be rebuilt.”
Bottom Line
What it all comes down to is that the restoration engine market is like the collector car market itself. This niche is a small part of the engine rebuilding industry, but it’s also keeping the doors of many smaller, veteran machine shops open. In other instances, it’s providing a very good supplement to the regular business that some larger shops enjoy. And it’s important to add that many in this niche feel it is growing, due to classic car auctions being seen on TV and the move to collect more later model cars as they age and become part of history.